There’s much about it that’s mythical, that takes the music way beyond its own unique syncopation and opening guitar riffs into something so big that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young undercut their own hot item, a tune titled “Teach Your Children,” by releasing “Ohio” as lightning fast as they did.
They put it on the market when “Teach” was still climbing, virtually assuring the earlier cut would never reach the heights it might have. Whether or not they actually sat down and decided to release “Ohio” with the immediacy they did isn’t clear, in part because “Ohio” was, well, epoch-making–and they seemed to know it themselves, even in the studio. “Ohio” was, to them, and to millions of others, including me back then, a much younger me, something more than late 60s protest.
The history is worth retelling. In the bloodiest confrontation between the National Guard and the anti-war movement, four Kent State students were shot dead when the Guard opened fire at a campus protest. There was, in early May of 1970, a sense, at least among some young people–including me–that the anti-war movement was gaining ground. The Vietnam War simply had not shown signs of ending. Body bags by the score were still coming back from a place most Americans couldn’t have pointed out on a globe. The muscle of the anti-war movement was flexing.
So, the story goes that David Crosby, who died just recently, showed Neil Young the duly famous picture of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of a kid who was shot just then, a picture as famous as any of the era or even of the century, for that matter.
Young took a look, grabbed his guitar, and went out into a stand of trees. In an hour he returned, having created a single line of music–or so the story goes. He played it, sang it, to Crosby, who immediately–seriously, immediately–reserved studio time yet that night. Thus, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young created, released, and marketed an anthem that, like the iconic photograph, came to speak for the entire era, the era in which, I confess, I grew up.
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer, I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
“Ohio” didn’t mess around. Nixon is right there, first line, just before “four dead in Ohio.” Neil Young didn’t try to be artful. If art requires allusion–something more than meets the eye–“Ohio” isn’t art. “Ohio” is testimony, in-your-face protest, and it’s in me, deeply in me.
Those students were shot on May 4. A few days later, the call went out—”May 10, we’ll gather in DC for a huge student protest.” I heard it early, my last semester in college. I was listening to the news on a clock radio my parents had given me before I left for college. Student protest groups were calling kids from campuses around the nation to come to the capital on the 10th of May for a giant anti-war protest: Kent State University, four kids dead. There’d been no protests at Dordt College, in the heart of a region that was and still is four-square Republican. Earlier, there’d been a gathering in Central Park in support of Nixon–he was, after all, the President, a kind of “divine right” thing.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
I decided right then, the news still coming in, that I had to go, and so I did. Three of us left in a VW bug for a trip that would take us halfway across the continent, far, far away, literally and figuratively. No college funds were spent. I don’t know that the three of us would have had the backing of any other souls on campus. We just took off.
That was more than a half-century ago. When I hear those savage opening lines of “Ohio,” I can’t help but think that decision to go, back then, was just as driven as any in the wake of Kent State, just as immediate as Crosby, Stills, and Nash to Neil Young’s inspired lyric. I didn’t think about going. We just left. I did. Me.
The whole era returned with the death of David Crosby last month. That death returned all of us who won’t and can’t forget the anti-war movement’s own battle hymn. Neil Young’s “Ohio” simply is the age. It simply is.
When we returned after that weekend, I was no more a radical than I’d been when I left. But I wasn’t the same guy, nor would I ever be. The Kent State March on Washington was no Damascus road for me, but when, once again last month, I heard that half-a-century old battle cry, I couldn’t help but think it had never slipped from my consciousness.
“Ohio” put a lock on the me that was emerging, even though, back then, I knew guys who were dying in Vietnam, which makes my moment in time small potatoes.
That was last month. Won’t be long and there’ll be green out back in our acre. I’ll go out and subdue the earth, or try. And when I’m pulling Russian thistles in July heat, “‘Give,’ said the little stream–Give, o give; give, o give,” will, unbeckoned, start playing from Let Youth Praise Him. Third grade, Oostburg Christian School. Different era, different me–but all of it a blessing. “Ohio,” “The Ninety-and-nine,” and “Strawberry Fields”–a thousand more play on a turntable that pours out tunes pretty much all on its own in a memory that’s not always mine to control.
Amazing–just amazing. We’re blessed with a score of moving parts, but a thousand more that don’t move but stick for reasons unknown and don’t wear out until we do.
Attended a good friend’s funeral this week, where the entire gathering read together Number One of the Heidelburger: “I am not my own. . .” Happens to be, today, my 75th birthday. The older I get, the more I come to believe the profound mystery of that beloved confession.
Long ago, in Mere Morality, Lewis Smedes tried to set out a consistent moral compass for believers. And what you do when your aging parents (like me) get ornery? he asked. His advice is as fixed in me as “Ohio” and “Onward Christian Soldiers.”” Here’s what he advised: “Respect your parents mystery.”
Sure as anything, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” and mysteries, really, all of us.
